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some curative talent
Saturday, April 11 2009
It was cool and clammy day, but at least my computer issues were resolving themselves. The recalcitrant laptop finally booted and accepted a new operating system. The key wasn't through changing the bios boot settings, which it was ignoring, but to instead unplug the SATA hard drive before the boot process and plug it in after the CD started booting. I'd heard SATA drives are hot-swappable somewhere, and this seemed to be evidence that this rumor is true. They might not be as hot-swappable as USB drives, but the fact that they can be registered with the system after it has already started booting is huge. (And why are such advances so late in coming?)
Last night I'd salvaged all of the old prisoner data from the old computers languishing in the garage. The data came to many dozens of documents, usually different versions of the same documents on one each computer. I put them in folders representing the computers they'd come from and compressed it all down to a zip file. The result: all of the prisoners' documents (in as many as six copies each) for the entire ten year life of the program so far only came to 16 megabytes of compressed data. I have a feeling those old Microsoft Word formats compress down a lot, since they seem to have a lot of repetition and blank data when viewed in a hex editor.
This evening Gretchen and I dined at the Rolling Rock diner at the mall, where we were joined by Penny and David. Then all of us went to see the movie Adventureland, a sweet love story set in a low-end summer amusement park in 1987. Our protagonist is nerdy and sexually inexperienced, and his love interest is world-weary and habituated to sexual exploitation. It was a good movie, though perhaps not as good as Gretchen thought it was. The most interesting thing about the movie was its soundtrack, which were the manifestation of the awesome powers of some curative talent. 1987 was not an especially good time for pop music, but the soundtrack was full of surprising gems, such as "Unstatisfied" by the Replacements and The Outfield's "I Don't Want to Lose Your Love Tonight."
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